The answer IMHO, is to give your employees something they can't get anywhere else, without spending a lot. Things that work.
To a very limited extent, this sort of thing works. Foosball, Playstations, etc. have an immediate effect on morale. However, it falls off quickly. In the kind of environment you're describing (typical startup) you've got tons of work to do, and are probably already short-handed. Adding these diversions will not help your ability to be productive if people are playing on them all the time.
I just recently left a company that had this philosophy. My pay was roughly half of what I'm worth in the real world, I had great healthcare that didn't cost me a dime, a very relaxed dress code (not naked was the code), free soda/coffee/spring water, etc. The perks were cool, but didn't make up for the fact that I was making about HALF of what I could make somewhere else. All of this stuff is nice, but each and every one of us is still at some level "coin operated".
I left that place. They're starting to tank now, so all of my stock (I was there long enough to exercise my options) makes a lovely wall hanging.
I seriously considered the idea of IC, to get the extra time off, but then I got an offer I couldn't refuse.. With my base plus commissions on what my sales guys sell, plus bonuses, I'm back at my market rate. It's a big company, has good benefits - in fact, just as good as the benefits I just left..
BTW - you say you're reluctant to go back to IC.. Why? That's what dice.com & headhunters are for. Work smarter... --
My time is more valuable to me than spending 2 hours getting to work (and 2 hours back), and $300/mo for the privilege. I can make $60k in a decent sized city, live 1 mile from work (or 20-45 mins to the burbs), free parking... and then spend my vacations in NYC if I really really wanted to.
Well, here in the Philadelphia area, it's not uncommon to live in South Jersey and commute to the other side of Philly, Valley Forge/King of Prussia/Wayne/Malvern/etc. Those destinations are much closer in mileage, but take 60-90 minutes to drive to. No reasonable mass transit, and only one or two roads that go there. I'll take 30 min easy drive + 90 min of relaxing train ride over a frustrating 60-90 min drive.
I do agree, however, that $60k in NYC is terrible. If you're any good at your coding, you should be at least getting $80k+. Also, the better companies in the city will gladly pick up the tab for public transit. --
First of all, it's a world standard, and you know how we love standards here at Slashdot. Nonstandard networks include AT&T or Verizon (a bizzare TDMA hack) and Sprint PCS, which is a new system entirely (although they get kudos for doing something new, CDMA).
I live in Philadelphia, so traveling is not really an option.
You'd be surprised... Lots of people commute daily from Philly to NYC. If you're just coding, chances are your employer would likely be agreeable to telecommuting 2 or 3 days a week.
I live in South Jersey (Burlington County), and from August, 1998 - December, 1998 (as part of a contract) I commuted daily from my home to NYC (2 WTC). My days went something like this:
Wake up @ 6:00 am
Out the door by 6:25 am
Drive to Trenton train station - parked by 6:50-6:55 am
7:00 am - get on Amtrak unreserved train
7:50 am - get into Newark Penn Station
7:52ish am - get on the PATH train
8:20ish am - arrive in WTC concourse
8:30 am - at my desk on the 67th floor with time to grab breakfast and start at 9
The reverse trip was easy too. Back on the PATH about 5:00, catch the 5:30ish train from Newark back to Trenton. Home before 7 every night.
Oh, by the way, the 50 minute train rides make for great naps. There are also AC outlets if you need to get work done.
Cost? Work was picking up the tab, but here's what it ran me:
Tolls - $1.50/day * 20 days == $30/mo
Parking - $80/mo (24/7 garage - unlimited)
NJT monthly pass - $160
PATH 40 ride pass - $40
The NJT weekly && monthly passes permit you to ride the Amtrak unreserved trains between certain hours at no extra charge. Nicer trains, more comfy seats too. --
PHP.. PHP is in the same boat, but you can develop middle-sized applications before grinding
your teeth. The language itself feels likc one giant hack and there is WAY to much built-in, no
module support to speak of, and the "unified" DB driver sucks (ODBC has a performance hit). It's
shoddy OOP and function support causes headaches.
True, the ODBC layer has a performance hit, but there are abstraction layers out there that give you a consistent API, phpLib for one. I don't use phpLib, I've got my own class library that I wrote. I can use mysql, msql, mssql, sybase, oci8 or pgsql by changing one variable in the little file I require() that's got db connection/auth data in it.
Also, pay attention to the PEAR project that's a part of PHP 4.x. They're working on a unified DB class. --
This trick works, but what I'd like to see is Kpackage (or whatever interface to RPM you use) ask you for your the root password when it's about to do someting that requires root access, or, even better, ACLs fully implimented in Linux.
Hmm.. I've got RH 7.0 with Helix GNOME installed.. That's the behavior on the GNOME side of the world.. When (as a normal user) I start up GnoRPM, up2date, helix-update or sysctlconfig, I get a nice popup asking me for the root password, then the software operates normally...
--
Is this guy serious, or just another "cellphones will cause the downfall of civilization" type?
Another possiblity, which, while it does not fall in your price range, but could prove far more useful is the Digital Wallet, from Minds@Work. I was thinking of picking up one of these for me. It holds 6GB of data, has a PCMCIA slot and USB connectors (works with Macs or Win98/2000). Only downside is the cost (nearly $500). However, consider that today, many universities are requiring students to purchase notebooks that cost on the order of $1500-3000. This is 1/3-1/6 that cost, solves your storage problems, and is pretty cool to boot. --
Exactly. They've got some solid BGP experience. However, they seem to like to apply large negative weights to everyone but Sprint, so most of their traffic goes out through Sprint. How it comes back to you is anyone's guess...
Frankly, I don't think it's anything revolutionary. If I wanted to emulate their setup, I'd fork out a buttload of cash to some large providers to pay for transit, next I'd hire some guys like Avi, or someone of his calibre to do it right.... --
The notion that one must spend $100k and spend four years of your life just to prove that you can learn, is simply ridiculous.
$100k? Yeah, that's just plain silly. I graduated from college in 1994. The total cost of my education came in just a shade under $12k. I went to a college that's held in fairly high regard too (Trenton State College, Trenton, NJ - was regularly in the top 10 in the 80s and 90s from US News). I worked hard in high school, and was rewarded with a full scholarship that covered the full cost of my tuition. I think I'm a pretty smart guy, but by that same token, there are others out there that are probably smarter than me.
Does the name on your degree get you anything? Nope. One of my friends is dealing with a customer that has a couple of Harvard MBAs running it, and boy do they ever like to wave those little slips of paper in your face... You know something? These are supposed to be good businessmen. These clowns can't distinguish their anuses from holes in the ground. Was their $100k degree worth $88k more than my $12k degree? Nope, in fact, it seems to in the real-world be worth LESS!
Bottom line? Go to college. It may not teach you what you need to do your everyday job, I'm living proof of that (I've got a Math/Ed degree, and I'm in the data security field). However, it DOES teach you valuable skills that you WILL use in real life. Skills like real, adult inter-personal relationships, real problem solving, and will certainly help you to more cohesively and more convincingly relate your thoughts to others. Take an 18 year old wiz-kid over a 22 year old who's just out of college? No chance. The 22 year old has already demonstrated the ability to carry something to completion (the coursework required to get his/her degree). --
Presumably, you trust your OS vendor. They have been granted an X.509 certificate for the server you're talking to, identifying your OS vendor as the people you're actually talking to. You can verify this by examining the digital signatures on the cert. It should be signed by a CA that you both trust. That's just something that can happen "automagically" with SSL, so long as the apps enforce "the rules". --
Yes, we've gone through three powers since I've been computing. I still remember when a 75 Meg would have been huge.
Frightening, no? I remember thinking I was ripping off the vendor when I bought a 420 MB IDE drive for $300. Under a buck per meg, I was in heaven...
--
Also, there are so many configurations for network setups that it may not always be possible to support all of them. It would be a technical support nightmare if they had to support DHCP routers, static IPs, PPPoE and so many other different kinds of logins that a network card could use.
Oh bull. If Linksys can do it in their $150 cable/dsl router/nat device, surely these "appliance" manufacturers can do it. A perfect example is the Dreamcast we've got in our office. It's got a stupid modem in it. It runs a WinCE-derived OS, so it can support networking. What was Sega thinking? An ethernet controller/jack costs less than a modem, last time I checked (how many reliable modems can you get for $20 retail? - none). The manufacturing costs are lower as well. I might have bought a Dreamcast to use at home if they included ethernet.
Obviously, Sega's not the only guilty one. Sony will soon join their ranks with the PS2. No ethernet, duh! --
Bear in mind, I'm a former VeriSign employee. I didn't work in the PKI side of the house. I was the technical manager for the NE region in the security services division (formerly SecureIT).
When you listen to PKI companies give their shtick about how wonderful PKI is and how it will save the universe, apply some simple common sense.
1. Who holds your private key (besides you)? - If you use the VeriSign solution for digital certs (the one where they manage the CA for you), in addition to your users having their keys, so does VeriSign. If you roll your own, your users have their private keys, and probably also the administrator who gen'd it for them (for when the user accidently deletes their keys). How will users store their private keys? On their hard drives? Poor security, easily obtained by a ruthless 3rd party. Floppy? Unreliable medium, more susceptible to theft. Smart Card? Susceptible to theft.
2. Remember when 128 bit keys was way too big to be factored? I do, and I'm all of 28 years old. Even with using 1024 bit keys, it's only a matter of a couple of years before many keys are useless. For the uninitiated, I've got your public key, and can find the prime factorization for a number that is your public key and your private key (for all intents and purposes, it's a bit more involved, but not THAT much more). If I compromise your private key in this way, you have no knowledge that I've done so (unless I'm a big moron about doing it), and I can freely digitally sign documents as if I were you. The signatures will even validate properly. Fun, huh? Maybe I'll buy some stuff over the net with your keys, and have it drop-shipped to a Mailboxes, etc. or some other such place.
3. Complexity of the system - I don't know about everyone else, but my mother barely grasps the concepts behind sending email and pulling up a web page. How's she ever going to understand the how and why it's not only safe, but legally binding to use PKI technologies to enter into agreements? --
Okay i'm obviously missing something here. I keep hearing all these statements about there being no DVD support at all whatsoever for Linux, but i know there are open source linux drivers for creative labs' dvd decorder card. Why doesn't this count as a legal dvd decoder?
Because the decoding is done in hardware. All of this hub-bub is about software decoders. The Creative project (really code given to Creative) for the DXr2 card is nothing more than a device driver. --
...you mention to some of the guys at work that this reminds you of when SkyLab crashed, only to be met with blank stares from a bunch of early 20's who were 2 or 3 at the time and have no idea that SkyLab ever existed.
Oh well, I guess I better get back to the walker, I'm pushing 30 here. --
Re:Failure to implement open standards.
on
Linux Failover?
·
· Score: 2
Oh, that was a good joke. Yes, Nokia uses it. And nobody else.
Juniper, 3Com, and Alcatel was at least working on it for a time in 1999. Yeah, that sounds like "just Nokia".:)
There's also HSRP. Everybody and his dog uses it in their Cisco routers. Why not take that ?
HSRP is a hacked version of VRRP v1. Where do you think they got the ideas from???
And no, I don't work for the IPRG group. I've got some friends who used to, and one that still does, but no, I don't work for them. --
Failure to implement open standards.
on
Linux Failover?
·
· Score: 4
It never ceases to amaze me. Companies want to sell you obnoxious amounts of software and hardware to do something as simple as create a highly available system. Not to mention projects like the Linux-HA people, who while are doing a good thing, are (IMHO) heading in the wrong direction (using RS-232 heartbeats is silly).
Has anyone considered VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol)? It's an actual open standard, and it works. It not only works, it works amazingly well.
One of the major users of VRRP technology is Nokia. They've done extensive work on the protocol, and use it in their line of firewalls (which btw run a heavily modified FreeBSD codebase).
VRRP uses multicast packets that are similar to OSPF "Hello" packets to let the partner(s) know it is alive. If the primary machine dies, the backup instantly takes over. When the takeover happens, it not only assumes the IP address of the dead machine, but it also answers for the MAC address of the dead machine. --
Our video guys are using the FAST 601 system. It's a complete system, including a dual P-III/550 system that runs under NT. The PC around the card seems like it's pretty much commodity style parts, except for the FAST card, and the Appian twin-head video card.
The system includes the FAST 601 card, which is the hardware part of the editing system. It's about the biggest PCI card I've ever seen in my life. We've got a two machine system setup for DVD production. The FAST does the footage logging from either DV or betacam masters, editing, various effects (they give you BorisFX), then gets shot over to the other machine (the DVD authoring station) where the sucker is chaptered and menued up, tested and finally imaged out to DLT that gets sent out to duplication. Warning: it ain't cheap.
Then again, those guys are doing big-time work. If you're looking to do some editing on little Johnny's first communion that was shot on a vhs camcorder, buy an iMac DV.
As for the question of how much disk space, the answer is "infinite". Our FAST has a 100G Medea unit attached to it, and it handles about 4 hours of video, MPEG2-V compressed. The FAST is more interesting than stuff from people like Avid, since it actually edits in MPEG2. The biggest problem you'll have is transfer rate. Think raid0 with a number of disks. That's how Medea does it. Insider their little black boxes are 3 or 4 large UDMA66 drives that are connected to a RAID0 controller. On the back-side, it looks like an UW SCSI-3 device.
If you're serious, get your butt on a plane and get to Vegas right now. NAB2000 is going on, and every major video editing company there is will be there. --
There really isn't a standardized way to assign value to a web site, unlike things like cars which have "blue book" values.
That's exactly the thing. There isn't a hard and fast rule for this. All of this notion of "what did it cost us to make the site?" really doesn't tell you what the site is "worth". In my experience, doing a valuation on a web site does not really so much have anything to do with what it cost to build the site, ie what it's "worth" to the owners of the site. Rather, consider the "worth" to the potential purchasers.
Consider the case of a site that implements a feature that your site does, only not nearly as well as your site does. The other site approaches you to do an acquisition, and wants to negotiate. Suppose your engine cost you $25k to build, between your time and materials (not an outlandish figure). What will it cost the other company to duplicate the level of functionality you can bring to the table now, today? If they need it in a hurry, and it will provide serious ROI for the purchasing company, that worth could be as high as $1 million, maybe more, maybe less.
The moral of the story is that you need to consider not just what the site is worth to you, but what it would cost the prospective buyer to duplicate, as well as the ROI they will get for their purchase. --
Options are sometimes worth something. Sometimes they aren't. It depends on the company, the management team, and what you're doing/selling/creating/etc. There's a LOT of stuff to think about. If you have friends that have done it, talk to them.
A typical company that offers options will have a four year vesting period. Vesting means your options become "usable", that is, you can use them to purchase stock at the price specified by your options agreement. Vesting schedules differ widely. I've been at companies where you vest 25% each year, I've been at places where you gradually increase your vesting over time, 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40%. I've also been at companies that did it the other way around (40, 20, 20, 20).
Can you see yourself committing 4 years of your life to this company? Does the company have a serious plan for how to make money? Do they have reasonable financial backing? Do they have good marketing and sales? Those are all questions that you should factor into your decision. Many options agreements have clauses that accelerate the vesting schedule should the company IPO, merge into a public company or get acquired. My current company has that.
Ask about cashless exercise of options too. That's when you give up a certain number of options in exchange for your stock. For example, let's say you have 100000 options at $0.10 each. Suppose you don't have $10000 around to exercise. Were you to do a cashless transaction, you take the IPO price, say $10.00, and convert ONE $0.10 option into 99 shares of stock. Note, you may have to claim the appreciated value of the options as income ($9.90 per option you gave up).
Even if you are NOT restricted under SEC Rule 144 with respect to sale of your stock, HOLD ONTO IT for at least 12 months. Why? If you dump your stock instantly, you get socked with short term capital gains tax on it. That's about 40%. Holding it for a year or more turns it into long term capital gains, at 22%. It's a no-brainer, unless you've got something that's guaranteed to offset the extra 18% you'll fork out in taxes to put your $$ into immediately (like say Qualcomm at the 11/98 price).
Be careful. If you hit the startup lottery, and win big, people around you WILL change. It did for me. My parents and grandparents are totally cool about it, they're just proud of me. My friends are happy for me and think it's cool. Other parts of the family aren't as good though. I've got extended family members that haven't spent more than 10 minutes talking to me over the past 10 years calling me asking about friends & family stock. People you went to college with will find out that you're suddenly a millionaire and start calling you about investing in something they are doing. People you don't even know will email you about getting money for things. I didn't even hit it huge (but I'll be quite comfy) and it's happening to me. I can't imagine what Taco, Hemos, ESR & those guys are getting hit with... --
Slashdot Mirror
To a very limited extent, this sort of thing works. Foosball, Playstations, etc. have an immediate effect on morale. However, it falls off quickly. In the kind of environment you're describing (typical startup) you've got tons of work to do, and are probably already short-handed. Adding these diversions will not help your ability to be productive if people are playing on them all the time.
I just recently left a company that had this philosophy. My pay was roughly half of what I'm worth in the real world, I had great healthcare that didn't cost me a dime, a very relaxed dress code (not naked was the code), free soda/coffee/spring water, etc. The perks were cool, but didn't make up for the fact that I was making about HALF of what I could make somewhere else. All of this stuff is nice, but each and every one of us is still at some level "coin operated".
I left that place. They're starting to tank now, so all of my stock (I was there long enough to exercise my options) makes a lovely wall hanging.
I seriously considered the idea of IC, to get the extra time off, but then I got an offer I couldn't refuse.. With my base plus commissions on what my sales guys sell, plus bonuses, I'm back at my market rate. It's a big company, has good benefits - in fact, just as good as the benefits I just left..
BTW - you say you're reluctant to go back to IC.. Why? That's what dice.com & headhunters are for. Work smarter...
--
I saw it described on one of the beta newsgroups, but don't recall the exact sequence to do it. I think it's an incredibly stupid default.
--
Well, here in the Philadelphia area, it's not uncommon to live in South Jersey and commute to the other side of Philly, Valley Forge/King of Prussia/Wayne/Malvern/etc. Those destinations are much closer in mileage, but take 60-90 minutes to drive to. No reasonable mass transit, and only one or two roads that go there. I'll take 30 min easy drive + 90 min of relaxing train ride over a frustrating 60-90 min drive.
I do agree, however, that $60k in NYC is terrible. If you're any good at your coding, you should be at least getting $80k+. Also, the better companies in the city will gladly pick up the tab for public transit.
--
You're close.
--
You'd be surprised... Lots of people commute daily from Philly to NYC. If you're just coding, chances are your employer would likely be agreeable to telecommuting 2 or 3 days a week.
I live in South Jersey (Burlington County), and from August, 1998 - December, 1998 (as part of a contract) I commuted daily from my home to NYC (2 WTC). My days went something like this:
The reverse trip was easy too. Back on the PATH about 5:00, catch the 5:30ish train from Newark back to Trenton. Home before 7 every night.
Oh, by the way, the 50 minute train rides make for great naps. There are also AC outlets if you need to get work done.
Cost? Work was picking up the tab, but here's what it ran me:
The NJT weekly && monthly passes permit you to ride the Amtrak unreserved trains between certain hours at no extra charge. Nicer trains, more comfy seats too.
--
True, the ODBC layer has a performance hit, but there are abstraction layers out there that give you a consistent API, phpLib for one. I don't use phpLib, I've got my own class library that I wrote. I can use mysql, msql, mssql, sybase, oci8 or pgsql by changing one variable in the little file I require() that's got db connection/auth data in it.
Also, pay attention to the PEAR project that's a part of PHP 4.x. They're working on a unified DB class.
--
Hmm.. I've got RH 7.0 with Helix GNOME installed.. That's the behavior on the GNOME side of the world.. When (as a normal user) I start up GnoRPM, up2date, helix-update or sysctlconfig, I get a nice popup asking me for the root password, then the software operates normally...
--
Another possiblity, which, while it does not fall in your price range, but could prove far more useful is the Digital Wallet, from Minds@Work. I was thinking of picking up one of these for me. It holds 6GB of data, has a PCMCIA slot and USB connectors (works with Macs or Win98/2000). Only downside is the cost (nearly $500). However, consider that today, many universities are requiring students to purchase notebooks that cost on the order of $1500-3000. This is 1/3-1/6 that cost, solves your storage problems, and is pretty cool to boot.
--
You're probably confused (likely an understatement) with the $19.95 service of getting update CDs shipped to your door monthly.
--
Frankly, I don't think it's anything revolutionary. If I wanted to emulate their setup, I'd fork out a buttload of cash to some large providers to pay for transit, next I'd hire some guys like Avi, or someone of his calibre to do it right....
--
$100k? Yeah, that's just plain silly. I graduated from college in 1994. The total cost of my education came in just a shade under $12k. I went to a college that's held in fairly high regard too (Trenton State College, Trenton, NJ - was regularly in the top 10 in the 80s and 90s from US News). I worked hard in high school, and was rewarded with a full scholarship that covered the full cost of my tuition. I think I'm a pretty smart guy, but by that same token, there are others out there that are probably smarter than me.
Does the name on your degree get you anything? Nope. One of my friends is dealing with a customer that has a couple of Harvard MBAs running it, and boy do they ever like to wave those little slips of paper in your face... You know something? These are supposed to be good businessmen. These clowns can't distinguish their anuses from holes in the ground. Was their $100k degree worth $88k more than my $12k degree? Nope, in fact, it seems to in the real-world be worth LESS!
Bottom line? Go to college. It may not teach you what you need to do your everyday job, I'm living proof of that (I've got a Math/Ed degree, and I'm in the data security field). However, it DOES teach you valuable skills that you WILL use in real life. Skills like real, adult inter-personal relationships, real problem solving, and will certainly help you to more cohesively and more convincingly relate your thoughts to others. Take an 18 year old wiz-kid over a 22 year old who's just out of college? No chance. The 22 year old has already demonstrated the ability to carry something to completion (the coursework required to get his/her degree).
--
Presumably, you trust your OS vendor. They have been granted an X.509 certificate for the server you're talking to, identifying your OS vendor as the people you're actually talking to. You can verify this by examining the digital signatures on the cert. It should be signed by a CA that you both trust. That's just something that can happen "automagically" with SSL, so long as the apps enforce "the rules".
--
If the home dir is set to mode 711, and their web directory (public_html, or whatever your configuration calls for) is set to 755, you'll be fine.
--
Frightening, no? I remember thinking I was ripping off the vendor when I bought a 420 MB IDE drive for $300. Under a buck per meg, I was in heaven...
--
Oh bull. If Linksys can do it in their $150 cable/dsl router/nat device, surely these "appliance" manufacturers can do it. A perfect example is the Dreamcast we've got in our office. It's got a stupid modem in it. It runs a WinCE-derived OS, so it can support networking. What was Sega thinking? An ethernet controller/jack costs less than a modem, last time I checked (how many reliable modems can you get for $20 retail? - none). The manufacturing costs are lower as well. I might have bought a Dreamcast to use at home if they included ethernet.
Obviously, Sega's not the only guilty one. Sony will soon join their ranks with the PS2. No ethernet, duh!
--
...and that's what I get for posting in the pre-coffee state.
--
Umm.. Maybe you've been locked in a closet since 1989, but she passed away. According to IMDB, 11 years ago.
--
When you listen to PKI companies give their shtick about how wonderful PKI is and how it will save the universe, apply some simple common sense.
1. Who holds your private key (besides you)? - If you use the VeriSign solution for digital certs (the one where they manage the CA for you), in addition to your users having their keys, so does VeriSign. If you roll your own, your users have their private keys, and probably also the administrator who gen'd it for them (for when the user accidently deletes their keys). How will users store their private keys? On their hard drives? Poor security, easily obtained by a ruthless 3rd party. Floppy? Unreliable medium, more susceptible to theft. Smart Card? Susceptible to theft.
2. Remember when 128 bit keys was way too big to be factored? I do, and I'm all of 28 years old. Even with using 1024 bit keys, it's only a matter of a couple of years before many keys are useless. For the uninitiated, I've got your public key, and can find the prime factorization for a number that is your public key and your private key (for all intents and purposes, it's a bit more involved, but not THAT much more). If I compromise your private key in this way, you have no knowledge that I've done so (unless I'm a big moron about doing it), and I can freely digitally sign documents as if I were you. The signatures will even validate properly. Fun, huh? Maybe I'll buy some stuff over the net with your keys, and have it drop-shipped to a Mailboxes, etc. or some other such place.
3. Complexity of the system - I don't know about everyone else, but my mother barely grasps the concepts behind sending email and pulling up a web page. How's she ever going to understand the how and why it's not only safe, but legally binding to use PKI technologies to enter into agreements?
--
Because the decoding is done in hardware. All of this hub-bub is about software decoders. The Creative project (really code given to Creative) for the DXr2 card is nothing more than a device driver.
--
Oh well, I guess I better get back to the walker, I'm pushing 30 here.
--
Juniper, 3Com, and Alcatel was at least working on it for a time in 1999. Yeah, that sounds like "just Nokia". :)
HSRP is a hacked version of VRRP v1. Where do you think they got the ideas from???
And no, I don't work for the IPRG group. I've got some friends who used to, and one that still does, but no, I don't work for them.
--
Has anyone considered VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol)? It's an actual open standard, and it works. It not only works, it works amazingly well.
One of the major users of VRRP technology is Nokia. They've done extensive work on the protocol, and use it in their line of firewalls (which btw run a heavily modified FreeBSD codebase).
VRRP uses multicast packets that are similar to OSPF "Hello" packets to let the partner(s) know it is alive. If the primary machine dies, the backup instantly takes over. When the takeover happens, it not only assumes the IP address of the dead machine, but it also answers for the MAC address of the dead machine.
--
The system includes the FAST 601 card, which is the hardware part of the editing system. It's about the biggest PCI card I've ever seen in my life. We've got a two machine system setup for DVD production. The FAST does the footage logging from either DV or betacam masters, editing, various effects (they give you BorisFX), then gets shot over to the other machine (the DVD authoring station) where the sucker is chaptered and menued up, tested and finally imaged out to DLT that gets sent out to duplication. Warning: it ain't cheap.
Then again, those guys are doing big-time work. If you're looking to do some editing on little Johnny's first communion that was shot on a vhs camcorder, buy an iMac DV.
As for the question of how much disk space, the answer is "infinite". Our FAST has a 100G Medea unit attached to it, and it handles about 4 hours of video, MPEG2-V compressed. The FAST is more interesting than stuff from people like Avid, since it actually edits in MPEG2. The biggest problem you'll have is transfer rate. Think raid0 with a number of disks. That's how Medea does it. Insider their little black boxes are 3 or 4 large UDMA66 drives that are connected to a RAID0 controller. On the back-side, it looks like an UW SCSI-3 device.
If you're serious, get your butt on a plane and get to Vegas right now. NAB2000 is going on, and every major video editing company there is will be there.
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That's exactly the thing. There isn't a hard and fast rule for this. All of this notion of "what did it cost us to make the site?" really doesn't tell you what the site is "worth". In my experience, doing a valuation on a web site does not really so much have anything to do with what it cost to build the site, ie what it's "worth" to the owners of the site. Rather, consider the "worth" to the potential purchasers.
Consider the case of a site that implements a feature that your site does, only not nearly as well as your site does. The other site approaches you to do an acquisition, and wants to negotiate. Suppose your engine cost you $25k to build, between your time and materials (not an outlandish figure). What will it cost the other company to duplicate the level of functionality you can bring to the table now, today? If they need it in a hurry, and it will provide serious ROI for the purchasing company, that worth could be as high as $1 million, maybe more, maybe less.
The moral of the story is that you need to consider not just what the site is worth to you, but what it would cost the prospective buyer to duplicate, as well as the ROI they will get for their purchase.
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A typical company that offers options will have a four year vesting period. Vesting means your options become "usable", that is, you can use them to purchase stock at the price specified by your options agreement. Vesting schedules differ widely. I've been at companies where you vest 25% each year, I've been at places where you gradually increase your vesting over time, 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40%. I've also been at companies that did it the other way around (40, 20, 20, 20).
Can you see yourself committing 4 years of your life to this company? Does the company have a serious plan for how to make money? Do they have reasonable financial backing? Do they have good marketing and sales? Those are all questions that you should factor into your decision. Many options agreements have clauses that accelerate the vesting schedule should the company IPO, merge into a public company or get acquired. My current company has that.
Ask about cashless exercise of options too. That's when you give up a certain number of options in exchange for your stock. For example, let's say you have 100000 options at $0.10 each. Suppose you don't have $10000 around to exercise. Were you to do a cashless transaction, you take the IPO price, say $10.00, and convert ONE $0.10 option into 99 shares of stock. Note, you may have to claim the appreciated value of the options as income ($9.90 per option you gave up).
Even if you are NOT restricted under SEC Rule 144 with respect to sale of your stock, HOLD ONTO IT for at least 12 months. Why? If you dump your stock instantly, you get socked with short term capital gains tax on it. That's about 40%. Holding it for a year or more turns it into long term capital gains, at 22%. It's a no-brainer, unless you've got something that's guaranteed to offset the extra 18% you'll fork out in taxes to put your $$ into immediately (like say Qualcomm at the 11/98 price).
Be careful. If you hit the startup lottery, and win big, people around you WILL change. It did for me. My parents and grandparents are totally cool about it, they're just proud of me. My friends are happy for me and think it's cool. Other parts of the family aren't as good though. I've got extended family members that haven't spent more than 10 minutes talking to me over the past 10 years calling me asking about friends & family stock. People you went to college with will find out that you're suddenly a millionaire and start calling you about investing in something they are doing. People you don't even know will email you about getting money for things. I didn't even hit it huge (but I'll be quite comfy) and it's happening to me. I can't imagine what Taco, Hemos, ESR & those guys are getting hit with...
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